pyston_v1

I'm not sure if it's an exact fit, but dropbox used to have pyston: https://github.com/dropbox/pyston The blog posts by Kevin Modzelewski went into the internals: https://blog.pyston.org/ Also by the same person, a good article on Python's performance: http://blog.kevmod.com/2016/07/why-is-python-slow/ As a side comment: On the subject of type inference, I really come to like python's type hints. I don't use mypy itself yet, but already had a habit of adding types in docstrings, and like it when I can add a clue that a signature/return is dealing with a something that's not a basic type. There are some nice little things out there for advanced typing, being added now and then: - TypedDict and Literal: https://github.com/python/typing/blob/master/typing_extensio... (TypedDict was accepted in PEP 589[1]) - NamedTuple had variable annotation

> I guess also economic incentives, there hasn't been an incentive for anybody to staff a 50 person project to build a Python JIT given that it's cheaper to rewrite some or all of the application in C/C++/Rust/Go whereas that's not an option in Javascriptland. Ask Dropbox https://github.com/dropbox/pyston

Dropbox's implementation of python was pyston: https://github.com/dropbox/pyston But I think it's dead now: https://blog.pyston.org/

It's basically meaningless when you try to line languages up with that sort of criterion. Go compiles fast enough that you can use it with a wrapper "interpreter": https://github.com/erning/gorun So does C: https://github.com/ryanmjacobs/c So does Haskell: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8676377 So does f#, via `#!/usr/bin/env fsharpi --exec` I think You can compile python: https://github.com/dropbox/pyston You can compile JS: http://enclosejs.com/ I wouldn't be surprised if someone found a way to AOT-compile bash, but I'm not going to bother looking for that. The only criterion I've found which makes some sort of sense is whether the language designers consider "scripting" a use case to actively support and use to drive language features, or if it's a second-class citizen.

I believe ABC, one of python's influence, used tagged pointers, but I can't find a quote on this. Not using tagged pointers was a conscientious decision from Guido (see e.g. https://github.com/dropbox/pyston/issues/181#issuecomment-62...) [edited] Something that people often overlook when talking about optimizing python is that the "simplicity" of the C Python API allowed the rich ecosystem of C extensions. GC, tagged pointers, etc... are great, and often used in modern VMs, but they tend to make integration w/ C code more difficult. Without rich C extensions, no numpy, no scipy, no scikit learn, no tensorflow/theano/etc... I am not sure this is completely incidental. [edit 2] Ah, found the quote I remembered about tagged pointers in ABC from Guido: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-July/04614...

Web assembly could allow dynamically-typed Python to become a first-class citizen, if someone were inclined to write a Python interpreter stack that compiled to LLVM (which might already exist? https://github.com/dropbox/pyston) The purpose of WebAssembly, pNaCl, and its ilk, is to get out from under the unfortunate accident that the "assembly language" target for browsers---i.e. the symbol set the browser can directly interpret and translate into machine operations---is JavaScript, which is not a language designed with memory or runtime performance deeply considered (or type safety, for that matter). While there are projects that somewhat ameliorate this issue (TypeScript, for example, tries to add type safety to the language), writing a something-to-JavaScript compiler is a much taller order than writing a something-to-LLVM compiler, wh

https://github.com/dropbox/pyston seems to be option 3

For all those talking about PyPy, have a look at Pyston, an ongoing effort by Dropbox to build a fast Python. https://github.com/dropbox/pyston

I wonder why Dropbox is focusing Pyston (https://github.com/dropbox/pyston) only on 2.7 atm. With PyPy supporting 2.7 very well, it'd seem a greater benefit to the community to target 3. That said, I'm sure there are specific things Dropbox needs to solve for 2.7 which PyPy doesn't do.

Unladen Swallow was abandoned, but for Python there is now Dropbox's Pyston - https://github.com/dropbox/pyston

Can anyone comment on the future of Pyston[1]? [1]: https://github.com/dropbox/pyston

From the perspective of using a JIT within python that the blog post raises you can see two different approaches of this being done in Python with the LLVM: 1) The pyston project from Dropbox is an attempt to build a python runtime sitting on top of the LLVM JIT https://github.com/dropbox/pyston 2) The numba project for python also uses llvm's jit direct from Python, just requiring you to add a decorator: http://numba.pydata.org/ a quick introduction is here: http://numba.pydata.org/numba-doc/0.18.1/user/jit.html

This makes me wonder- Why did Dropbox guys started building Pyston [1] ? Why not get behind pypy team and support them ? [1] https://github.com/dropbox/pyston

I can't source the comment with a quick googling so take the recollection at face value, but I recall one of either the Pyston team members or Guido himself in an interview saying that he hadn't been involved so far. As of release 0.2 he was referring to it as being "built by some of my colleagues"[1]. Looking at the list of contributors for the Pyston repo on github[2], I don't see gvanrossum among them. [1]: https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/510154006564335616 [2]: https://github.com/dropbox/pyston/graphs/contributors